In the telecommunication industry, certain circuits are considered critical, generally because any interruption of the service provided by the circuit would be unacceptable. For instance, circuits used to transport traffic relating to emergency 911 calls and circuits used by the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control system often are designated as critical because their failure could lead to catastrophic consequences. Other circuits, including some circuits in a typical Signaling System 7 (“SS7”) network, can be considered critical because a service interruption of such a circuit would negatively impact the provision of telecommunication services to a particular geographical area. On the other hand, many circuits are not considered critical, in that the failure of a single such circuit would have only minimal impact on the provision of telecommunication services.
Circuit failures can result from many sources, including cable cuts, equipment failure, or even power loss or natural disaster at a critical location. In order to guard against the catastrophic failure of a critical circuit, telecommunications providers often build redundancy into their telecommunication networks. For instance, FIG. 1A illustrates a portion of a simple telecommunication network 100. In example network 100, service switching point (“SSP”) 104 is located in Grand Junction, Colo. In order to have telecommunication access to the rest of the world, Grand Junction's SSP is connected by SS7 “A Link” 108 to Signal Transfer Point (“STP”) 112 in Denver, which provides a connection between SSP 104 and the rest of the telecommunication network. In this example, A Link 108 is a critical circuit because, if it suffered a service interruption, Grand Junction would have no connectivity to STP 112. To remedy this problem, a telecommunication provider typically would provide an additional A Link 116 between SSP 104 and a second STP 120. In this way, if A Link 108 were cut, connectivity would be maintained by A Link 116.
Those skilled in the art will recognize the importance of the relationships between critical circuits and the telecommunication resources used to provision those circuits. Many benefits would be realized by a telecommunication provider's ability easily and quickly to assess such relationships. Merely by way of example, by knowing precisely what equipment, facilities and locations are associated with a given critical circuit, a telecommunication provider could more easily and efficiently ensure the continued availability and performance of that circuit. Likewise, if a telecommunication provider could maintain a listing of all telecommunication resources associated with critical circuits, the provider would be able to protect those resources and better ensure that a scheduled outage would not affect any critical circuits.